Liquid Dynamics: challenges for

sustainability in water and sanitation

STEPS Working Paper 6

Correct citation: Mehta, L., Marshall, F., Movik, S., Stirling, A., Shah, E., Smith, A. and
Thompson, J. (2007) Liquid Dynamics: challenges for sustainability in water and
sanitation, STEPS Working Paper 6, Brighton: STEPS Centre
First published in 2007
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iii

CONTENTS
1. Introduction
1
2. Current debates: examining the fault-lines and beyond
4
Who is shaping the debate?
4
Global assessments and their problems
6
Technology as the x
9
Reconceptualising scarcity and access
10
Debating sustainability in water and sanitation
13
3. Addressing Sustainability in dynamic water and sanitation systems
14
Social dynamics
16
Technological dynamics
17
Environmental processes
18
Addressing Sustainability
21
4. Meeting governance challenges in water and sanitation
24
From centralised to decentralised systems
24
Local institutions managing water
26
Community-driven water governance
27
Rights, equity and justice
28
Global water governance
29
The rise of neo-liberalism and market-based mechanisms
30
Whats missing in the water governance debate?
31
5. Designing appraisal of water and sanitation
32
Cost benet analyses and large dams
33
Multi-stakeholder forums the case of the World Commission on Dams 35
Action learning/research and reexivity
39
Local, sustainable and equitable?
40
6. Conclusions: towards a research agenda
41
References
44

iv

LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: Summary of nancial estimates for reaching water and
sanitation goals.

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Dimensions of concern with water and sanitation dynamics

15

Figure 2: Withdrawal of Blue Water for human use 1900-2000

19

vi

1. INTRODUCTION
The eects of recurring oods and droughts, the deaths of 6,000 babies daily
from waterborne diseases and growing sanitation problems in booming periurban and urban centres illustrate the devastating impacts of what the recently
launched Human Development Report highlights as the crisis in water and sanitation (UNDP 2006).1 More than most other resources and services, water and
sanitation are essential for all aspects of life, wellbeing and productivity. Water
is the lifeblood of ecosystems, essential for many eco-hydrological functions.
Water and sanitation are also assets basic, in many ways, to peoples livelihoods
and wellbeing. Safe water and sanitation improve health and everyday activity.
Better and easier access to water and sanitation make more time available for
economic activities and keep children in school, thus improving human capital.
And water access is essential to building and maintaining many livelihood strategies, whether based on small-scale household cultivation and income generation, irrigated cash crops, livestock production, or livelihoods such as shing,
that are reliant on lakes, rivers and wetlands.
Water and sanitation is therefore recognised as a key Millennium Development
Goal2 with important links to many others. Yet despite the eorts of international organisations, governments, donor agencies and civil society, progress
in achieving it has been slow. A billion people still lack access to safe water and
2.6 billion lack access to adequate sanitation, while the so-called problem of
water scarcity attracts growing political attention. Concerns with water and
sanitation are certainly not new. Indeed they have been a focus of development
interventions and international action since the 1977 Mar del Plata UN World
1
The HDR 2006 essentially argues that the water crisis is rooted in poverty, inequality and
unequal power relations and maintains that biophysical scarcity is exacerbated by inadequate
management policies.
2
The MDGs (http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/) a set of wide-ranging global development
goals aiming towards halving world poverty by 2015. Goal 7, target 10 reads Reduce by half the
proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water. Access to basic sanitation
was added to the target following the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development.

Water Conference and the subsequent International Drinking Water Supply and
Sanitation Decade (IDWSSD). Today, therefore, the world is full of wisdom on
water issues. Markets for ideas are replete, and new markets emerge every year
in the form of additional fora, conferences and workshops.3 Yet much of this
debate and the policies and interventions it is linked with fail to address water
and sanitation problems in ways that are sustainable and meet the needs of
poorer and marginalised people.
Amongst many possible reasons for these failures, in this paper we highlight two
pervasive tendencies. First, policy debates and the often generalised, globalised
arguments that underpin them often remain disconnected from the everyday
experiences of poor and marginalised women and men. In other words, the
framings - or understandings and representations - of water and sanitation
systems that dominate policy debates often are at odds with the framings held
by local water users, so that issues central to poorer peoples perspectives and
priorities are ignored. Second, current approaches are often not up to the task
of addressing emergent challenges associated with contemporary dynamics in
water and sanitation systems. This is what, in this paper, we refer to as liquid
dynamics: the patterns of complexity and interaction between the social,
technological and ecological/hydrological dimensions of water and sanitation
systems. Today, more than ever, these involve rapid changes and interactions
that take place across multiple, interlocking scales, aected by processes such
as climate change and rapid urbanisation. They involve many uncertainties and
possibilities of surprise. The result is a variety of possible pathways, or particular
directions in which water and sanitation systems might develop over time. Yet
most analytical and policy debate in relation to water and sanitation has not
been geared up to understand such dynamics. Hence, it has not been well
3
The increasing focus on water and sanitation issues over the last decades has spawned a host
of organisations. Examples include the World Water Council (WWC) an international collaboration
of NGOs, governments and international organisations founded in 1996. Some 40 per cent
of its member organisations are for-prot private companies operating in the water sector
which hosts the World Water Forum, a global event that takes place every three years. Others
are the Global Water Partnership (GWP), created in 1996 by the World Bank, the United Nations
Development Programme and the Swedish International Development Agency in response to
the Rio-Dublin principles; the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), existing
under a mandate of the United Nations, focuses exclusively on people lacking access to water
and sanitation; and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), a non-prot scientic
research organization focusing on the sustainable use of water and land resources in agriculture
and on the water needs of developing countries and forming part of the Consultative Group on
International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) system. Another major organisation is the International
Water Resources Association (IWRA) founded in 1972, works to promote the sustainable
management of water resources around the globe and was one of the founding members of the
World Water Council.

equipped to address which, and how, particular pathways might lead to sustainability, poverty reduction and social justice in relation to water and sanitation.
This paper, one of an initial set of six from the new STEPS Centre at Sussex, reviews
past and current debates in the water and sanitation domain and takes initial
steps towards developing a framework that might better address the sustainability challenges posed by liquid dynamics. We begin by outlining key strands in
the current debate, emphasising the dominance of approaches based on global
water assessments, technological xes, and universalised notions of water
scarcity. Each has generated important critiques, giving rise to major fault-lines
in analysis and policy. Nevertheless, we suggest that across these debates, there
has been insucient attention to the dynamics and uncertainties that increasingly characterise water and sanitation issues, and how they are experienced
by poorer and marginalised people. These liquid dynamics are the subject of
the next section, where we trace dynamic processes in social, technological and
environmental realms that increasingly impinge on water and sanitation. These
interact in ways that give rise to complex, dynamic water and sanitation systems.
Moreover, dierent groups - whether hydrologists or engineers, policy-makers
or NGOs, wealthy and poorer water users, or women and men, often understand
or frame these dynamics in dierent ways. We introduce a simple framework
for thinking about systems in this way in relation to water and sanitation, and
considering the implications for pathways to sustainability.
In this light, the paper then turns to the political and institutional relationships - or governance processes - that shape debates and action in relation to
water and sanitation, considering the extent to which they enable or constrain
pathways to sustainability. We suggest that while there have been some important moves - for instance in involving communities and in addressing water and
sanitation issues across scales through multiple institutions - key challenges
remain in fully addressing the need to adapt to dynamics and uncertainties, and
to respond to the multiple framings of diverse groups. Governance approaches
and practices are in turn linked to appraisal; to how knowledge of water and
sanitation is gathered in order to inform decision-making and wider institutional arrangements. Here, as the fourth section shows, moves from narrow,
technically-focused approaches such as cost-benet analysis towards those
that broaden out and open up appraisal, allowing a wider range of perspectives
to inform policy and political discourse, are crucial if appraisal is to support
pathways to sustainability and social justice in water and sanitation. At the same
time, keeping the materiality of water and sanitation in sight - the importance of
water as a material resource, and the biophysical dimensions of liquid dynamics
- is essential. In the nal section, we draw the discussion together to indicate essential elements of a STEPS research agenda in the water and sanitation eld.

A few words on nomenclature are in order before we proceed. Water issues in

this paper encompass both what is commonly known as water supply and water
resources management, or as the 2006 Human Development Report puts it,
water for life and water for production (UNDP 2006). Water for life is considered to be one of the basic necessities for human functioning. This underlies
the notion of a human right to water, usually seen to be between 20 100 litres
per person per day, largely for domestic purposes (see Mehta 2006). Water for
production refers to water in irrigation, industry and small-scale entrepreneurial
activities such as e.g. brick-making and beer-brewing, as well as using water to
produce food for subsistence. This distinction, however, is highly problematic
from the perspective of local users whose subsistence activities encompass
both the domestic and productive elements of water and for whom there is little
sense in separating water for drinking and washing and water for homegardens
or other small-scale productive activities (see e.g. van Koppen 2006, Moriarty
2004, Nicol 2000).4 Thus in this paper we avoid this discursive divide, while at the
same time reecting on how and why it has come to be so dominant in analysis
and policy. We also try to address another malaise in the literature. Water and
sanitation are often mentioned in the same breath, even though their logics,
politics and disciplinary underpinnings are vastly dierent. Thus, wherever
possible and required, we are careful to spell out where our discussions carry
dierent implications for sanitation and water issues.

2. CURRENT DEBATES: EXAMINING THE FAULTLINES AND

BEYOND

WHO IS SHAPING THE DEBATE?

Water and sanitation are multi-faceted issues that can be seen from a multiplicity of perspectives. Water epitomises a natural resource whose state is variable
across time and space (Mehta 2006). It uctuates in availability and is not easily
4

A multiple-use systems (MUS) project, a partnership between professionals, academics and

practitioners within the domestic and productive water use sectors was recently set up to explore
frameworks and develop tools to implement multiple use water services that bridge the gap
between domestic and productive and are more eective in achieving poverty reduction and
gender equity than conventional approaches to water service delivery (see www.musproject.net
for more information).

controlled, and it cannot be produced in the true sense of the word. It has dierent faces and meanings in the everyday contexts within which people live their
lives. It can be simultaneously perceived as a free, social, economic, cultural
or symbolic resource. People across the globe value water for both its noneconomic and economic roles. In addition, water has deep cultural, symbolic
and spiritual signicance in many settings, ranging from the holy signicance of
the Rivers Ganga and Narmada in Indian cosmology to the role of the Balinese
water temples in irrigation management in Indonesia. Access to water reects
power asymmetries, socioeconomic inequalities, and other distribution factors.
Sanitation issues, too, are multi-faceted. They span questions of engineering (e.g. drainage/groundwater contamination), culture (e.g. perceptions and
practices around defecation and hygiene), technology (e.g. whether pit or
ush latrines and accompanying drainage issues) and the socio-economy (e.g.
nancing mechanisms and behavioural switches to using toilets).
Nevertheless, ocial discourses tend to focus on certain aspects of water and
sanitation. For example, water debates are frequently dominated by economic
and engineering aspects. Since the Dublin Declaration of 1992 (http://www.
wmo.ch/web/homs/icwedece.html), characterisation of water as an economic
good often overshadows other meanings and roles of water, especially in the
socio-cultural and symbolic realms. Sanitation is currently dominated both by
engineering issues, and by public health debates concerning the behaviour
change necessary to induce people to stop open defecation and use toilets.
Again, these projections may obscure other aspects, including wider sociocultural practices.
As these instances illustrate, there are many conceptual and ideological struggles in the domain of water and sanitation. Yet dominant debates and related
policy approaches are largely framed by a few major global players such as the
World Bank, the Global Water Partnership, the World Health Organisation, the
World Water Council, IWMI and the CGIAR system. As we explore in this section,
this gives rise to a set of dominant approaches that emphasise universalised
notions more than local and contextual ones, and technical issues more than
social ones. Yet these emphases have also been contested and critiqued by
other players. Here, we explore these dominant emphases and fault-lines in
contemporary debates, moving from those around global water assessments, to
those around technological xes to water and sanitation problems, to debates
around water scarcity and access.

6
GLOBAL ASSESSMENTS AND THEIR PROBLEMS

There are many recent examples of global assessments of water scarcity and
related issues. Often created and disseminated by inuential international organisations, these have become highly inuential in policy debates about addressing water-related problems. However, there is a range of problems with the
ways such assessments are framed, and the assumptions they make.
First, their portrayals of scarcity largely focus on the physical and volumetric
aspects of water scarcity, as opposed to considering disparities in distribution.
An example is the Water Poverty Index, compiled by UK researchers in 2003.
This represents a data set that explores the relationship between water scarcity
and water poverty (Lawrence, Meigh and Sullivan 2003). The data represent an
interdisciplinary attempt to indicate the degree to which water scarcity impacts
on human populations (Shah and van Koppen 2006). By correlating the data in
this manner, the researchers reveal that they subscribe to the hypothesis that
water scarcity determines water poverty (ibid).
Second, there is usually a primacy of rst world denitions which make it difcult to monitor sustainability of use and impacts on the poorest at local and
national levels. For example, the MDG targets refer to safe drinking water.
The Joint Monitoring Programmes of the World Health Organisation refer to
improved water types (WaterAid 2003). What constitutes improved is contentious (e.g. a borehole, a protected spring). These denitions often have little to
do with local understandings of what constitutes improved water supply. In
Merka, western India, for example, villagers prefer local sources of water (e.g. the
local tank and wells) to government supplied piped water which is ostensibly an
improved supply. They nd the taste and quality of government supplied water
suspect (Mehta 2005).
Third, there is often confusion between dierent global agencies regarding how
to dene water and sanitation targets, indicators for assessing progress and nancial estimates to achieve the goal. Thus the ways in which the problems and
goals are presented and interpreted, their solutions and the nancing required
to achieve them vary across the dierent agencies. Take the example of nancing. The World Water Council estimates that an additional US$100-110 billion
a year is required to reach the goal of full global service coverage and other
aspects of global water security, including irrigation, industrial euent, wastewater treatment, water resource and environmental management. By contrast,
the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) also aims at universal coverage for 2025 but focuses on safe drinking water and sanitation and
estimates an additional $9 billion a year (Mehta 2004). Further variation occurs

because the calculations are complex and aect many variables for which there
is no reliable or comparable information among countries. This implies that
even the levels of current spending on which future projections are based are
uncertain and varying (Mirosa 2004). Moreover, the results of the projections
themselves depend on the assumptions made about factors such as levels
of current access, choice of technology and cost per unit (Terry and Calaguas
2003). As argued by Mirosa (2004) there is also much confusion regarding what
some of the estimates refer to and what they include. This sometimes leads to
the use of the same gure by dierent institutions to refer to dierent goals.
Not least, there are two ocial sets of international water goals: 1) halving the
proportion of people without access to sanitation and safe drinking water by
2015 (part of the Millennium Development Goals); and 2) achieving full global
service coverage, which includes all aspects of water security, by 2025. Table
1 summarises how various estimates and projections relate to these dierent
goals.
Table 1: Summary of nancial estimates for reaching water and sanitation
goals.
Organisation /
researcher
World Water
Council and
Global Water
Partnership
WSSCC
World Bank
Averous (cited in
Winpenny 2003
and in Guerquin
and others 2003)

Estimates
Additional US$100-110 billion a year to reach the 2025
goal (US$16 billion of these additional resources for
drinking water and sanitation)
Additional US$9 billion a year for the 2025 goal for
drinking water and sanitation
Additional US$15 billion a year for drinking water and
sanitation for the 2015 goal
US$49 billion a year for the 2015 goal (incorporates
full water and sewerage connections and primary
wastewater treatment to the urban populations)

Source: Mehta with Mirosa Canal (2004).

Clearly a key issue is the standard and level of service and technology. Many
open-ended issues emerge as problems or questions. Critics argue that many
of the high-cost, capital intensive solutions may not be appropriate, and need to
be compared and put together with a range of low-cost technologies that may

be more suited to the demands that will be placed on them (Terry and Calaguas
2003). Such critiques have become part of a high-prole attack on the World
Water Council, Global Water Partnership and other organisations. Civil society
groups (for example at the Mumbai World Social Forum of 2004) argued that the
emerging imperative for additional water nancing was the result of a collusion
between the international nancial institutions and large water corporations
- even though the latters current lack of interest in the international market
would appear to dispute this claim. Furthermore, there is little doubt that
high-powered nancing initiatives initiated by the World Water Council, Michel
Camdessus,5 former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), and others have been bereft of wider consultation and participation. They
have taken place with little or no participation from developing country governments or NGOs, let alone the end users, namely the worlds poorest people.
The extent to which they represent the needs and perspectives of poor people
is therefore questionable.
Thus, such global assessments tend to be framed in particular ways that
obscure questions of distribution and access. They also show little evidence of
reexivity, i.e. an awareness of how such assessments reect, at least in part, the
social, economic and political positions of the individuals and organisations that
produce them. Not surprisingly, then, water and sanitation are sites for contentious politics. At the 2nd World Water Forum in the Hague in 2000, the inaugural
meeting was stormed by naked demonstrators protesting against large dams
and water privatisation which they saw as pushed by powerful actors. Indeed
global assessments, and the particular problem-framings and solutions that
they justify, such as large dams, are bitter sites of struggle in the water domain.
Conca (2006) draws on the social movement theory of Tarrow et al (1998) to
argue that anti-dam movements involve a multiplicity of organisational forms
and coalitions that make use of a wealth of tactics, from conventional lobbying
to direct confrontation, calling for a more open-ended, process-oriented perspective on contentious politics (McAdam et al. 2001 quoted in Conca 2006, p.
174). As political ecologists remind us, this struggle in the water and sanitation
domain is both over access and meaning (Peet and Watts 1996). Both are key
in determining whether water debates and policies lead to sustainability and
social justice.

The controversial Camdessus Report (referenced here as (Winpenny 2003) can be accessed
online at: http://www.worldwatercouncil.org/download/CamdessusReport.pdf.

9
TECHNOLOGY AS THE FIX

Technology is commonly evoked as a means to assure long-run resource

abundance in many arenas (e.g. Norgaard 1994). In the water domain, recent
technological optimist policies range from the search for the new blue revolution and more irrigation systems for Africa (Movik et al. 2005) and the crop
biotechnology revolution to solve problems of water scarcity, to - at their most
far-fetched - expansion into space to mine Mars for water. There is no doubt that
technologies have key roles to play in addressing water and sanitation problems.
Yet driven by conventional engineering paradigms, technological choices in
water and sanitation are often portrayed as existing outside politics, with technology expected to provide solutions that transcend politics. Technology is thus
made out to be an anti-political instrument with scientic committees and
experts sought as arbiters (Barry 2001) - around which scarce resources are
managed and allocated. However, technologies and techniques are of course
often deeply political. Contestations around technological solutions, be it
large dams, Indias fantastical river interlinking project, or the Integrated Water
Resources Management approaches now written into water policies and institutions across sub-Saharan Africa, have become sites of politics, questioning both
their cultural and material implications.
In the 1980s, technology was seen as the solution when the focus in water and
sanitation was largely on hardware solutions. Due to the controversies around
them (for example, with large dams, see WCD 2000 and Goldsmith and Hildyard
1984, 1992) and an acknowledgement of the failures of the supply oriented
mode (due to the litany of broken down handpumps and unused toilets) there
was then a shift towards software models. These focused on gender, institutional
and governance issues (see Mehta 2004). Despite some increased attention to
distributional and demand management issues, technology continues often to
be seen as the universal x for scarcity (e.g. in arguments for augmenting supply
through storage and reservoirs).
Furthermore, the relationships between technology and socio-cultural issues
are often overlooked. Necessity is not always the mother of invention. Instead,
culture and meaning can also drive a societys technological development (see
Pfaenberger 1992). For example, large water structures embody power and
prestige in many ancient hydraulic societies. Emotions such as shaming, cleanliness and disgust are today often drawn upon by sanitation specialists to encourage toilet use. Indeed, in many rural areas the key sanitation challenge has to do
with cultural practices and perceptions, alongside issues such as environmental

10

impacts. Thus, it is necessary to understand the dynamic interplay between

society, technology and ecology - something which rarely comes to the fore in
conventional analyses.

RECONCEPTUALISING SCARCITY AND ACCESS

It is estimated that 2.7 billion people will face water scarcity by 2025 (UN 2003).
Orthodox commentators such as the World Water Commission, the World Bank
and others have been warning us of a global water crisis for a while, often
drawing on the Malthus-inuenced gloomy arithmetic of water to highlight
that half the worlds population will live under conditions of severe water stress
by 2025. Moreover, conicts and growing competition over water allocation are
anticipated to lead to water wars at the regional or continental level.
But what is scarcity? How has it been conceptualised? Does the way the
problem is constructed, shape the proposed solutions? And do global or theoretical portrayals of scarcity match up to the way the issue is experienced locally
or is there sometimes a disconnect between global and local solutions? There is
no dearth of research on water scarcity. Since the 1990s, there has been an impressive urry of reports, papers and global assessments of water scarcity. Most
of this literature looks at either the nite nature of global water supplies (e.g.
Shiklomanov 1998); classies countries according to a water stress index on
the basis of their annual water resources and population (see Falkenmark and
Widstrand 1992), or creates water scarcity scenarios for groupings of countries
or regions based on projections of future water demands and needs (e.g. Seckler
et al. 1998; WRI 2003; Rosegrant et al. 2002). While there is some acknowledgement of the dierences between water shortages - which refer to physical
amounts - and water scarcity - which could be a social construct or the result of
auence, lifestyle choices and expectations (see for example Winpenny in FAO,
n.d.), - most of the literature focuses on volumetric and physical measures.
More nuances are provided by a political science and international relations
literature that teases out dierences in the orders of scarcity, ranging from
physical (rst order scarcity) to second order or socio-economic scarcity (referring to the lack of ability to adapt to the problem of physical scarcity), to
third order scarcity that refers to the socio-political, technological and cultural
changes that a society must undertake to deal with scarcity (Allan 1998;
Ohlsson and Turton 1999; Wolfe and Brooks 2003). But even these debates fail
to distinguish adequately between the socially constructed and biophysical
aspects of scarcity. They lack a focus on how the problem of scarcity is constructed and how problematic framings in policy discourse can actually lead to a

11

worsening of scarcity conditions. They tend not to disaggregate users and their
entitlements or to look at the politics of distribution in the context of political
economy. Nor do they focus upfront on the social relations underlying how
technology choices are made, and their embeddedness in diverse governance
and institutional arrangements. Finally, most global portrayals of water scarcity
see it as something natural and inevitable, instead of something that is either
exacerbated or caused as a result of socio-political processes. Instead, empirical
work has demonstrated that water crises are more often the result of struggles
over access to and control over water resources than a natural condition (see
Jairath forthcoming and Mehta 2005) . Indeed, scarcity can be manufactured
in certain ways to legitimise interventions and controversial schemes such as
large dams that can serve the interests of powerful actors and may not end up
beneting the water-poor (ibid).
The 2006 UNDP Human Development Report, Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty
and the Global Water Crisis either rejects or nuances most of these conventional views. It contends that water scarcity is not due to physical shortages
of water. Instead, it emerges due to inequality of access, power, poverty and
institutional and policy failures. Through detailed analysis, it argues that there
is more than enough water in the world for domestic purposes, for agriculture,
and for industry. It urges governments and donors to wake up to the 1.8 million
child deaths each year related to dirty water and poor sanitation that dwarf the
casualties associated with violent conict (UNDP 2006). Thus, water shortages
are the result of a combination of institutional, ecological and socio-political
factors. Solutions, therefore, cannot be simplistic. Our starting point, thus, is
that scarcity is not a natural condition. It is not something that is inherently in
the nature of things. It does not arise because there is too little water or food
to go around. Instead, the problem lies in how we see scarcity and the ways in
which it is socially generated. Conventional visions of scarcity that focus on aggregate numbers and physical quantities are privileged over local knowledges
and experiences of scarcity that identify problems in very dierent ways.
Simplistic notions of scarcity often lead to simplistic solutions which can intensify
problems of access and exclusion. These range from enhancing water supplies,
increasing and improving existing infrastructure and technologies to bringing in
markets through cost recovery principles and privatising scarce water supplies.6
Since the Dublin Declaration of 1992 (http://www.wmo.ch/web/homs/
icwedece.html), water is increasingly seen as having economic value in all its
6
However, the declaration of water as an economic good often robs water of its multiple
meanings and roles, especially in the socio-cultural and symbolic realms. .

12

competing uses. By implication it is being argued that the basic human need for
safe drinking water can no longer be regarded as a sucient criterion for providing an engineered supply free of charge (Black 1998, p. 55). Because water
is scarce, goes the logic, it must be used judiciously and its demand managed.
Free water is considered wasted. Accordingly, ecient resource management
is equated with water having a price. The price signal is thus evoked as a way to
solve water scarcity problems. Around the turn of the century, the World Bank,
the World Water Council and others advocated privatization models as the best
way to manage scarce goods and services eciently. However others questioned their impacts on human wellbeing and peoples basic rights, especially in
the worlds poorest countries (Bayliss 2002; Gleick, Wol et al. 2002; Budds and
McGranahan 2003; Mehta 2004).
More recently, rights-based approaches and notions of entitlement to water
and sanitation have been evoked as ways to enhance access. For instance in
2002 the United Nations Committee on Social and Economic Rights explicitly
recognised the right to water as a human right and stressed its importance in
realising other human rights.7 It also stressed the role of states in progressively
realising the right to water, determining this to entail the provision of sucient,
safe, aordable water to everyone. There is, however, still much resistance on
the part of donors and powerful players in the water domain to accepting water
as a human right. An exception is South Africa whose constitution explicitly
recognises the right to water, and where its Free Basic Water policy provides
a basic level of water (25 litres per capita per day based on a household size
of eight people) free to all citizens This goes against the grain of most donor
discourses that shy away from explicitly recognising the human right to water.
However, implementation has been a problem. For instance, it is dicult to
stipulate how much water should constitute the basic right, and many critics
feel that 25 litres is too low to meet basic and subsistence needs, especially
if one rejects a distinction between water for life and water for production.
Furthermore, alongside the remarkable commitments to providing free water,
South Africa has experienced several World Bank-inuenced policy changes
that have led to poor households being disconnected from water supplies,
contravening their basic rights. Privatisation contracts with international rms
have also led to water becoming very expensive for many poor people. Thus in
dancing to the two tunes of markets and rights, equity considerations are being
compromised (Bond 2003).

General comment E/C.12/2002/11, dated 26 November 2002, accessed 29 December 2002 at:
http://www.waterobservatory.org/library/uploadedles/right_to_water_Articles_11_and_12_of_
the_Inter.pdf.

13
DEBATING SUSTAINABILITY IN WATER AND SANITATION

Thus dierent approaches to conceptualising scarcity, access, distribution and

allocation are part of the framing of international and national debates around
water and sanitation. These framings, in turn, have implications for governance
processes and institutional arrangements. Despite the continued prevalence
of approaches focused on aggregate, technical aspects of water supply, as we
have traced there have been important moves towards a greater recognition of
distributional issues. For example, the need to use scarce water supplies equitably is the logic behind the water allocation reform processes underway in many
parts of the world. These are leading to institutional reforms and programme
approaches designed around water rights, aimed both at enhancing equity and
eciently managing water (see Section 4).
But merely enhancing access is not enough. Even recent debates have paid insucient attention to what we might term the functionality of water access, i.e.
the particular services that people derive from water and sanitation and which
they value, in the context of their livelihoods and social and cultural values. This
requires greater attention to diverse local settings and the meanings and values
that people attach to water and sanitation in their everyday lives than is found
in much contemporary analysis and policy discourse. At the same time, the
sustainable development of that functionality is key, referring to the extent to
which water and sanitation access enables people, communities and regions to
develop the personal, social and economic dimensions of their livelihoods and
uses of water and sanitation (on top of their basic needs for water for survival) in
a way that is resilient and robust over time and in the face of shocks and stresses
(see STEPS Working Paper 1 on Dynamics).
In water and sanitation processes and interventions, analysts have argued that
it has not been easy to assess whether something is sustainable or not due to
the diculty of dening sustainability in operational and quantitative terms
(Figueres, Rockstrm et al. 2003). In part this is due to questions concerning
the adequacy of assessments and designs to gauge social and environmental
costs (see Section 6). These could include: natural resource depletion; compensation to future generations for social and cultural costs as well as the depletion of natural resources; impacts on health, or nancial and institutional costs.
Engineers such as Mihelcic et al. (2003) have stressed the importance of bringing
together three dimensions when viewing sustainability in water and sanitation.
These include societal sustainability (social justice, equity), environmental sustainability (human and ecosystem health, natural resource protection and restoration) and economic sustainability (productivity, employment, growth, etc.).
Watkins, McConville and Barkdoll (2004) build on these to identify and explore

14

several metrics for water use sustainability. These include: (1) the ratio of water
withdrawal to total supply; (2) the percentage of income spent on water and
sanitation; (3) the incidence of waterborne diseases and (4) the indices related
to a managed systems ability to cope with extreme events. They also consider
the temporal and spatial scales over which such metrics can be calculated.
These are valuable indices. Overall though, current approaches lack adequate
criteria to judge sustainability or pro-poor development in water and sanitation
(Figueres, Rockstrm et al. 2003). Most indices tell us little regarding whether
water and sanitation use is enhancing equity or contributing to poverty reduction in a dynamic world. Furthermore, sustainability could also be directly linked
to the level of local participation. There is growing evidence that when intense
community mobilisation allows local people to play a key role in project design
and execution, sustainability is enhanced and there is an incentive to make
the system more resilient. The rapid spread of community-led total sanitation
initiatives in Bangladesh is a good case in point. Here community members,
encouraged by external actors such as NGOs, collectively decide to stop open
defecation, construct low-cost latrines and continue to maintain them even
after oods and other shocks (Kar and Pasteur 2005).
What then constitutes pro-poor sustainability with respect to water and sanitation systems, their governance and institutional designs? An approach is
needed that comprehends the interaction of social, technological and ecological dimensions of complex, dynamic water and sanitation systems, and
addresses whether they are sustainable in terms that poorer and marginalised
people value, and which enable them to exercise agency in water and sanitation
services provision. Yet as this section has argued, dominant water debates - and
the approaches to sustainability they give rise to - take insucient account of
these questions of dynamics and of poorer peoples values. In the next section,
we oer some rst steps towards an alternative framework.

3. ADDRESSING SUSTAINABILITY IN DYNAMIC WATER AND

SANITATION SYSTEMS
In todays dynamic world, water and sanitation systems involve rapidly-changing
social, technical and ecological processes. In this section, we discuss these
liquid dynamics and introduce a perspective on sustainability in a water and
sanitation context that takes them into account. Furthermore, we suggest that

15

how water and sanitation systems are understood - or framed - diers according to the individual or group concerned and their social, political or disciplinary
positioning. Dierent framings may represent systems dynamics in dierent
ways, and will vary in how far they acknowledge and understand the many uncertainties involved. Particular framings in turn justify particular approaches to
water and sanitation governance. We are interested in the interaction between
how water and sanitation systems are framed, the interventions that result, and
their outcomes - for poor people and for complex ecologies and hydrologies.
Figure 1 illustrates these concerns. Our own meta-framing of water and sanitation system analysis is shaped by our interest in the resilience of these systems
in relation to the functions valued by poor people, and a concern for greater
reexivity - or recognition that framings of a system are partly constituted by
the observers own circumstances.
Figure 1: Dimensions of concern with water and sanitation dynamics

As pointed out earlier, the functionality that people derive from water and
sanitation systems is determined by the interactions between complex social,
technological and environmental processes. Whilst each of these is discussed in
turn below, it is important to bear in mind, and will soon become apparent, how

16

each implicates and is implicated by the other. It can be dicult to tease apart
one set of processes from another. Indeed, such separations can be deeply
contested. Social activities do not simply impact upon the physical ows and
operation of hydrological cycles (cf. Oki and Kanae 2006). Rather, the meaning
societies invest in water, both culturally and economically, inuences how they
frame and understand hydrological cycles, interpret data, read in between gaps
in the data, and as such socially construct water cycles. This can subsequently
lead to interventions that aect the water system and its services for the poor
(sometimes in unanticipated ways).
Scientic and technological development is an important form of intervention.
Technologies help people exploit and manage water resources, and mediate
relationships between the social and the hydrological in important ways. But
knowledge about water/sanitation and their technologies are the products of
social processes interacting with the material world. The same processes give
those technologies their meanings. A good example is the contrast between
water-intense ushing toilets, and the cultural notions of development attached
to this technology, compared to dry latrines, and cultural associations with them,
and the natural and social climates in which each is deemed to be appropriate.

SOCIAL DYNAMICS

Social processes play into the dynamics of water and sanitation systems in a
number of important ways. First, processes such as demographic change, the
concentration of populations in urban centres, patterns of agricultural practice,
socio-economic development, and changes in livelihoods and lifestyles aect
demands upon water resources, sanitation and the use of water in productive
sectors. Thus for example, rising norms of cleanliness in auent societies
(Shove 2003) are leading to changes in water and sanitation practices, while in
terms of food consumption, the growing presence of meat in daily diets is also
impacting heavily on water demand.
Second, social processes and relations around caste, gender, ethnicity, race and
so on often shape who gains access to water and sanitation services and whose
perspective counts while allocating scarce resources. Third, social processes
underpin the development of governance arrangements for meeting demand
and arbitrating between conicting demands - as will be discussed in more
detail in the section on governance below. Frequently, such socially-shaped
governance arrangements are at odds with the allocation arrangements that
emerge from local social relations and practices, sometimes resulting in disso-

17

nance and conict. A nal set of social processes inuencing water systems and
their functionality are cognitive processes, or relations of power and knowledge.
Thus scientic, cultural and economic institutions (such as the World Bank and
CGIAR system) frame complex water systems, appraise options, form water
values, and inform the development of water systems. But of course, there are
inevitably knowledge gaps and uncertainties. One example is the incomplete
monitoring of complex hydrological cycles, whose patterns are strongly inuenced by poorly-understood climatic shifts (UNW/UNESCO 2004). Yet powerful
institutions rarely admit to such uncertainties and knowledge gaps, whether out
of haste or because their own power is tied up with an image of a more stable,
certain water world that they can shape in predictable ways - even though in
practice such views often prove illusory.
Thus, the social processes that aect water and sanitation systems include
the power/knowledge relations that aect how water issues and dynamics are
framed. These in turn shape the interventions made into hydrological cycles,
their material eects, and the consequent form those cycles take. Social processes aecting framing, in this way, can have real hydrological impacts.

TECHNOLOGICAL DYNAMICS

Technologies are produced by social processes, whilst also transforming materials for human benet. They consequently play an important mediating
role between the social and the environmental dimensions of systems. Water
and sanitation-using technologies simultaneously presume a particular view
of the system, place demands on it, and shape it; in eect, they co-construct
the system. Such technologies include agricultural techniques; industrial processes, and household technologies for washing, bathing and ushing. Explicit
and implicit presumptions about water availability built into such technological
developments, compared to actual water systems, will have profound impacts
on the resilience of the systems. For example, dam engineers may miscalculate
the volume of water in the river or encourage the boom of water-guzzling industries in the command area, thus leading to a reduction in the life or benets
of the project.
Auent societies have long-established and standard water and sanitation
technologies. In many cases these are little altered from the capital-intense, hydraulic civil engineering technologies rst introduced by the Victorians (Hamlin,
1992). This is the technological paradigm that most utility companies entering
into developing country markets inhabit. But such capital and (water/energy)

18

resource intensive technologies can be ill-suited to other environmental

contexts, such as providing services to populations in arid regions. The dominant
technological paradigm has overcome this through the extra-basin transfer of
water through large irrigation projects, large dams and so on. While benets
have been accrued, there have also been major social and environmental costs
(WCD 2000) as well as unintended consequences such as disease outbreaks.
This has resulted in a renewed interest in alternative and/or updated traditional
technologies more appropriate for specic situations, to complement or substitute traditional civil engineering solutions (Gleick 2003). Examples include
rainfed or trickle irrigation for agriculture, rainwater harvesting techniques, reed
bed wastewater treatment, and community-led total sanitation. But here the
challenges concern equity and going to scale - can these systems serve large
populations? - as well as questions around productivity and markets in a context
where these are often isolated small-scale initiatives amidst globally-connected
food and industrial systems. Some therefore argue that there is a crisis of innovation in the water and sanitation industry, and troubling complacency around
current, long-standing technology solutions that simply will not work for the
majority world (Thomas and Ford, 2005). In other cases, as with community-led
initiatives in sanitation, strong arguments are being made for greater attention
to processes of participation and facilitation to enable the adoption of new toilet
systems, so going to scale sensitively and equitably (Kar and Pasteur 2005).
Thus dierent technological developments have dierent implications for the
long-term resilience of water and sanitation systems, and for the livelihoods
and wellbeing of the poor. This raises crucial questions in liquid dynamics: which
trajectories of technology development improve resilience in ways that suit the
poor, and which undermine it? How far, in dierent settings, are the technology
strategies of donors, governments and global utility companies inclined towards
appropriate water service technology solutions for the poor, and where is more
attention needed to develop participatory innovation systems?

ENVIRONMENTAL PROCESSES

Geo-hydrological conditions are an obvious and key factor in water systems.

Water cycles, consisting of interacting processes of evapotranspiration, climate,
precipitation, land cover, water courses, water uses and so on inform basic
hydrology (Chow and Maidment, 1988). Hydrological processes determine
the physical availability of water ows. Oki and Kanae (2006) estimate that in
aggregate people around the world currently withdraw around 3800 cubic kilometres of circulating renewable freshwater resources, or about 10 per cent
of the maximum available globally. However, this masks stark distributional

19

inequalities and high stress in specic regions (UNDP 2006). Moreover, water
resource datasets can be incomplete: the UN World Water Development Report
in 2006 (UN 2006) pointed out how information about the state of aquifers,
especially in developing countries, was especially inadequate. Climate change
is introducing new uncertainties to these ows. Growing recognition of the environmental services derived from ecosystems, and the water needs of those
systems, is adding another dimension and demand to environmental processes
in water systems. Agriculture is the dominant water user, but the part diverted
for domestic and industrial use is growing rapidly. Withdrawals for agriculture
represent the bulk of water use (74 per cent), with industry (18 per cent) and
municipalities (8 per cent) consuming signicant, but smaller proportions
(Shiklomanov 2000).
Total global blue water (i. e. freshwater available from surface sources such as
rivers and lakes, as well as underground sources such as aquifers), withdrawals
are estimated at 3,390 km3, with 2,490 km3 (or 74 per cent) for agriculture,
mostly irrigation (Figure 2). About 20 per cent comes from groundwater, mostly
for drinking water and irrigation. Industrial and domestic use is growing relative
to that for agriculture. And water use for energy generation hydropower and
thermo cooling is growing rapidly. Of course, not all water withdrawn is lost.
Much is available for reuse in river basins, but often at degraded quality which
requires some reprocessing before it can be used again.
Figure 2: Withdrawal of Blue Water for Human Use 1900-2000

Source: Shiklomanov (2000)

20

On average about 60 per cent of rainfall does not reach rivers or aquifers, but
remains in the soil. This soil moisture, or green water, represents a potential
in terms of increasing agricultural productivity, in combination with supplemental irrigation such as rainwater harvesting or microirrigation. Studies have
shown that providing an additional 100 mm of blue water to rainfed agricultural
systems during dry spells can increase productivity from 1 to 2 tonnes of cereals
per hectare (source: http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/WWF4/html/action_2.htm).
Physical scarcity occurs when available resources are insucient to meet all
demands, including minimum environmental ow requirements. Arid regions
are most often associated with physical water scarcity. But an emerging, alarming
trend is an articially created scarcity, even in situations where water is apparently abundant. This is due to the overdevelopment of hydraulic infrastructure,
most often for irrigation. Water resources are overcommitted to various users,
and there are often competing pressures to meet human demands and environmental ow needs.
Many hydrologists accept that the social is a major intervening factor. And not
just at local or regional scales, but across the global scale too. For example Oki
and Kanae have argued that:
.it no longer makes sense to study only natural hydrological
cycles. For this reason, some studies have started to consider
the impact of human interventions on the hydrological cycles,
thereby simulating more realistically the hydrological cycles
on a global scale. In such studies, human withdrawals are
subtracted from the river ow, and the regulation of ow regime
by major reservoirs is incorporated (Oki and Kanae, 2006: 1069).
River basin approaches and Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM)
similarly try to take a more socially-aware perspective on the hydrological cycle
at dierent scales (settlements, watersheds, rivers), but also over dierent timescales (short-term needs; seasonal demands; medium-term developments in
demand; long-term availability of water).
Whilst the integration of social impacts into hydrological studies has been
widely accepted for some time now, much of the work continues to be based
on an equilibrium model of water systems. Thus water users social practices are
understood as intervening in and disrupting hydrological cycles, and as needing
to be brought back into line to restore hydrological balance. Such narratives
often justify policy processes aimed at restoring such balance. However, such
notions overlook the more dynamic, sometimes non-equilibrial ways that social
and hydrological processes interact.

21
ADDRESSING SUSTAINABILITY

In multiple ways then, dynamic environmental, social and technological processes co-construct water and sanitation systems and the distribution of functions that people derive from those systems. Shifting demographics, technological innovation, economic development, land use patterns, climate change,
prevailing social values, new institutional arrangements, and other factors obviously aect the operation of water and sanitation systems (although the precise
inuence of each can be far from obvious, see also Moench et al. 2003; 2004).
Some factors can be internal to the water system itself, in the sense that they
are an explicit and dynamic social, technological or ecological component of
the water system. Other factors are more contextual. A sustainable water and
sanitation system can be understood as one that can maintain a level of service
provision over the long-term by adapting and coping with these dynamic components and contexts. Yet while sustainability refers to maintaining services in a
general sense, we also need to recognise Sustainability, referring to the services
valued by a particular social group (such as the poor), or to meet particular, normatively-dened goals such as poverty reduction or social justice (see STEPS
Working Paper 1 on Dynamics).
System properties contributing to Sustainability are stability, durability, robustness and resilience. Depending on the Sustainability goals in question, these
properties - and the possible trade-os between them - may be valued in different ways. The stability of a water and sanitation system relates to its ability to
withstand shocks internal to the system, such as engineering failures, switches
in ownership or governance, and so on. The durability of the system rests in its
ability to maintain service provision even when conditions within the system
change, placing stresses, such as declining aquifer levels, periods of drought,
or growing numbers of household, agricultural or industrial connections/users.
Relatively rapid changes in context can also challenge the system, and the
ability for water and sanitation services to cope with these exogenous shocks is
a product of system resilience. Examples of such external shocks include disasters such as oods, pollution incidents, rapid urbanization, disease outbreaks,
and sudden shifts in land use patterns, like deforestation. Finally, the robustness
of the system is the exogenous correlate of its durability, in the sense that it is
the ability of the system to adapt to more gradual contextual developments,
such as climate change (though this may also generate shocks, such as more
extreme weather events), demographic change, agricultural intensication, and
industrialisation.

22

In practice, the way dierent, interacting and complex processes inuence the
provision of water and sanitation services may not fall so neatly on either side
of the spatial boundary of the system (internal or exogenous) or the temporal
boundary (sudden shocks or secular trends). To a large extent, this depends
upon how we decide to analyse and organise these real-world complexities, by
dening system boundaries and classifying real-world processes and events in
certain ways and not others. These are questions about how water and sanitation stakeholders negotiate and interpret water systems how the system is
socially constructed or framed. Whatever the construction, and recognising that
this systemness is a necessary simplication of real-world complexity, terms
such as stability, durability, resilience and robustness nevertheless provide a
language for considering the emergent properties of the dynamic and interacting processes that provide water and sanitation services to the poor, and the
likelihood of services enduring future events and developments.
Of course, it remains far from clear what is actually meant by the water system,
and how to build in properties like resilience. How should the boundaries be set
for studies of water and sanitation resilience? Obvious physical or hydrological
boundaries like watersheds are complicated by territorial jurisdictions, and intersected by socio-technical networks whose webs of interaction make boundarysetting more dicult. Should, for example, international trade in virtual water be
included within the water system boundaries of analysis and management? And
which relations should be privileged or highlighted in analysis of this complexity?
In short, whose water system counts? And what Sustainability goals - what kind
of water services - should be privileged or prioritised? So along with a concern
with the resilient functionality of water systems for the poor, there is a need to
be reexive in analysis and management, and to recognise how framings shape
the ways analysts and practitioners approach this challenge.
One example of an approach that treats water issues as part of an integrated
social-technological-ecological system geared towards equitable sustainability
is Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM). IWRM may be dened as a
process which promotes the co-ordinated development and management of
water, land and related resources, in order to maximise the resultant economic
and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems (Global Water Partnership, 2006). The idea of integrated water resources management grew out of an increasing awareness
of the problems created by managing the water needs of dierent sectors in
isolation. IWRM is not only a process as indicated by the denition, but also a
management tool, an implementation strategy, and a philosophy.

23

The core point of IWRM is integrated management of sectoral and aggregate

demand (Shah and Van Koppen 2006) to ensure that activities impacting on a
water body are co-ordinated, taking into account synergies and accumulative
eects of actions. The notion of integration provides a framework that seeks
to avoid fragmented and piecemeal approaches to water management and
strongly conceptualises water management as embodying interaction between
social and hydrological/environmental systems (source:http://www.dwaf.gov.
za/iwrm/contents/about/what_is_iwrm.asp). The necessary inclusion of a
wide range of features at the IWRM scale means that properties like stability and
robustness do tend to be emphasised. This contrasts with many other water
management approaches which are more narrowly concerned with the immediate provision of water to those without access, with little regard for long-term
sustainability. Understandably, immediate needs, such as health and survival,
often eclipse consideration of how such access meshes with wider basin-level
concerns about water ows and quality (Satterthwaite et al, 2005).
However, IWRM has been criticised for being a vague and fuzzy concept, and for
being dicult to implement in a practicable fashion (Biswas 2004). Moreover
Jairath argues that while IWRM recognises inequity in access and control over
water resources, this is conceptualized as a management distortion and not as
derived from an imbalance in power relations between those with dierential
access to water benets. Thus while productivity and eciency gains may be
possible through better organised/coordinated activity, the same cannot be
said of equal sharing of the benets thus generated unless access to these
benets is ensured through political rearrangements (Jairath forthcoming).
The water and sanitation systems framework outlined in this section therefore
shares some important emphases with the IWRM approach, in its concern with
integrated social-technological-environmental systems, with sustainability,
and with equity. However our framework attempts to go further: in specifying
the Sustainability goals of poorer and marginalised people, and the systems
properties that contribute to them; and in addressing the relationship between
systems dynamics and their framing by dierent groups. This, we hope, oers
the potential for a more systematic and operational way of addressing water and
sanitation Sustainability, while also addressing explicit normative goals around
poverty reduction and the promotion of social justice.

24

4. MEETING GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES IN WATER AND

SANITATION
The increasing dynamism and multiple framings that characterise water and
sanitation systems pose many challenges for policies and institutions aiming
to address water problems. In this section, we consider how and how far governance approaches in the water and sanitation sector - past and present - have
recognised and attempted to deal with these challenges, with what degrees of
success. As we show, there have been some key moves in political, institutional
and management approaches to water and sanitation issues: from an emphasis
on centralised to decentralised systems, recognising the role of local institutions
and community management; from supply-driven approaches to an emphasis
on demand and rights; and from state-based approaches to those including
global governance and market-based mechanisms. Each of these discussions
in the water and sanitation domain has roots in longer traditions of political
theory, and in broader debates about political and institutional relationships (see
STEPS Working Paper 2 on Governance). And the shifts are not linear; there are
debates and contradictions within and between them. Overall though, we argue
that what is often missing are adaptive dimensions that enable governance to
respond exibly to liquid dynamics, and reexive dimensions that acknowledge
how management approaches are underlain by particular understandings of
water and sanitation systems. Both, we suggest, are necessary if water governance is to contribute to pathways to Sustainability and social justice.

FROM CENTRALISED TO DECENTRALISED SYSTEMS

The governance of water resources raises issues at the heart of the relationship between state, society, technology and community. Since Karl Wittfogels
theory of hydraulic despotism that proposed that medieval oriental societies
needed centralised bureaucracy to control labour in order to build massive irrigation infrastructure (Wittfogel 1957), water has been at the centre of some
theories of the state and civilisation. Contemporary writers such as Worster
(1983) have developed Wittfogels theory to argue that even today, control over
water resources has led to the concentration of nancial and political power in
the hands of bureaucratic and technocratic elites. For example, much research
has demonstrated how large centralised water systems have led to alliances
between large farmer lobbies, engineers, politicians and nanciers (e.g. Mehta
2005).

25

In the last two decades, several parallel discourses have contributed towards
a major policy and political shift in the way water resources are governed.
Disenchantment with the state has often been at the heart of these narratives.
These range from a politically-oriented environmental critique of colonial and
post-colonial governmentality (Gadgil and Guha 1992; Agarwal and Narain
1997), which has demonstrated how power and control manifests itself in
natural resource management, to mainstream international policy discourse on
the devolution of water resource institutions that seeks to transfer rights and
responsibilities to local user groups (Meinzen-Dick 1997; Hooja, Pangare et al.
2002).
In the new discourse, community-based organisations (CBOs) or water user
associations (WUAs) are understood to replace state agencies in governing
their own resources. Policy-makers target relatively small-scale water bodies
such as small dams and reservoirs, indigenous or traditional water systems, or
even small patches of canals (Mosse 1997; Mollinga 1998; Jairath 1999). They
envisage stakeholder participation for more contentious issues related to urban
water resources or at river basin level that may involve several contenders with
disparate demands. Proponents of IWRM have formulated it explicitly to create
multi-layered, large scale governance structures at the scale of river basins and
beyond (Shah and Koppen 2006). Thus the overall trend on the one hand has
powerfully moved away from relying only upon centralised state bureaucracies
to govern water resources, to nding local governance structures for smaller
scales of technology, society and ecological units. On the other hand there
have also been powerful attempts like IWRM to create integrated, centralised
and national water policy frameworks with a river basin as a unit of water and
land resources planning.
Another strand of policy debate advocates joint governance by farmers organisations and state agencies. Such joint governance is proposed mainly for large
technological systems or large areas covered by river basins. Thus overarching
legal and institutional frameworks have been developed, discussed and implemented for Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT), turning over the responsibility for irrigation management from the state to users, for Participatory Irrigation
Management (PIM), aiming for increased farmer participation in water management, as well as for IWRM (Joshi and Hooja 2000).

26
LOCAL INSTITUTIONS MANAGING WATER

A major contribution towards these political and policy shifts have been the
studies and literature on collective action and sustainable institutions that
developed in response to Hardins powerful thesis of the tragedy of commons,
which implied either state intervention or privatisation as the only possible
solution (Hardin 1968). A large body of empirical research has examined the
emergence and operation of collective managerial arrangements for common
property resources (CPRs) and has studied how local institutions have evolved
to govern access to and control over water use (e.g Berkes 1989; Bromley and
Cernea 1989; Wade 1988, Ostrom 1990). The Zanjeras in the Philippines and
the Balinese water temples are examples of sustainable culturally-embedded
common property regimes related to water resources management that have
survived several centuries.
The contribution of common property theorists in refuting Garrett Hardins
(1968) tragedy of the commons analysis has been tremendous. They have
suggested that institutions can facilitate co-operation, rather than competition, between resource users. From a policy perspective, they have shown how
planners sometimes erroneously believe that they are starting de novo when
conceiving grandiose projects, and in the process delegitimise and neglect deepseated indigenous rules for governing resources (Coward 1980). Nonetheless,
CPR theorists portrayal of both institutions and communities tends to be static
and aggregated, as well as placing perhaps too much faith in the eectiveness
of local or customary rights systems across diverse contexts (Roth, Boelens et
al. 2005). The focus on collective action has directed attention away from social
dierence, often to the extent of portraying the societies concerned as homogenous, and harmonious. Institutions, too, are sometimes portrayed ahistorically
and taken to be all-inclusive. Few drive home the fact that institutional arrangements governing natural resources management are often elite-driven, exclusive, messy and conict-ridden. CPR theorists also tend to gloss over factional
dynamics and politics in communities, a weakness which has been criticised by
Agrawal (1999) and Mehta, Leach et al. (1999).
For the most part, CPR approaches have also not acknowledged the exible
norms and social conventions that underpin institutions that eectively manage
resources, even if they are not designed with this purpose in mind. Conventional
approaches still tend to see the environment in static, rather than dynamic,
terms. The impacts of global forces on local management are not fully explored
and the scientic uncertainties and conicts concerning dierent perceptions
of resources and their management are ignored (Mehta, Leach et al. 1999). By

27

contrast, critical social science perspectives have emphasised multiple levels

(global, local and in-between), diversity (in terms of livelihoods and perceptions)
and see institutions as part of a constant process of negotiation that involves
power and conicting interests within communities (see STEPS Working Paper
2 on Governance). Emerging views try to break down the distinctions between
local/global and between formal/informal institutions in order to understand
better the complexities and uncertainties that face natural resources management today (ibid).

COMMUNITY-DRIVEN WATER GOVERNANCE

A growing body of literature acknowledges the problems of portraying local

communities as homogenous and harmonious. Due to the attractiveness of
theories of smallness (cf. Schumacher 1973), there is often an implicit assumption that small is always beautiful - and functional and good for the poor. In
other words, it is implied that if a project is small, it is bound to be successful and
egalitarian and that the principles of democracy, equity and participation are
sure to be espoused. As lessons from watershed development schemes show,
however, ecological soundness does not necessarily mean egalitarianism. Often
the existing power and social relations within a community are based on quite
dierent axioms, as is convincingly demonstrated by Mosse (1997; 1999) and
Shah and Raju (2002) in their work on tanks in South India. It is these axioms
which ultimately form the basis of present and future patterns of resource use.
In development theory more generally, echoed in the water domain, community on the one hand is considered as a space for consensus generation and on
the other a rational, economic space. Not only is it assumed that the consensus
builds common good, but that culturally and historically shared or conicted
ideas held by the members of the community have only peripheral importance
(Mosse 1999). Community-driven development thus focuses on building consensus, ignoring that communities are always made of various interest groups
possibly ridden with conicts. Various notions of community thus come to
interact with each other (rational and economic space, consensus building
arena, conicting interest groups, and community as a cultural space or social
organisation with social and historically shared and contested meaning of social
identity), creating a great deal of tension (Agrawal 1999). In relation to water
governance, a better understanding is needed of the relationship between these
various forms of community space, the extent to which, in particular settings, it
exists or comes to be imagined around a common idea or interest, and the
culturally and historically-specic dynamics of community change. (see for

28

example DeSouza 2001). Incorporating multiple, possibly contested framings of

water issues could draw on Chatterjees notion of community alliances around
ideas, interests and notions; to emphasise the inherently political nature of such
alliances he calls this political society (Chatterjee 1998). Yet incorporating such
a dierentiated, historically and culturally specic, continually contested and
changing notion of community poses a challenge to conventional approaches
to water governance conceived around far more static notions.

RIGHTS, EQUITY AND JUSTICE

Water management has evolved considerably from the hydraulic imperatives

and supply-driven approaches that dominated in the 1950s-70s, in which it
was largely an issue of getting the technical solutions right and of building infrastructure and storage. Indeed there has been something of a paradigm shift
over the last couple of decades - even if there are now signs that the pendulum
is swinging back again. In this shift, many countries have been busy reforming
their water policies, concentrating to a large extent on crafting water rights
regimes in response to what is perceived as increasing scarcity of water (Saleth
and Dinar 2000). Water rights are seen as creating better security, as well as
facilitating allocation to promote eciency of use as well as opening up opportunities for more equitable distribution. Tisdell (2003) in an overview of the
three dominant water doctrines - riparian rights, prior appropriation and what
he terms non-priority permits - argues that the latter is the most conducive
to justice, understood as enabling equitable allocation. However Movik (forthcoming) has critiqued this view, contending that it disregards issues of power
asymmetries, rendering a doctrine of priority permits more suitable in instance
of severely skewed societies.
Attention to water rights emphasises the importance of institutions in water
management (Roth, Boelens et al. 2005). As the literature on legal pluralism
acknowledges, the rules of the game that structure access to water in practice
involve informal rules and norms as well as formal legislation. The institutions
created are not just formal ones (supported by laws, licences and so on) but also
include negotiation arenas through which dierent stakeholders in water management defend, increase and inuence access to water (Meinzen-Dick and
Bruns 1999; Spiertz 1999). Legal pluralism thus essentially refers to the existence and interaction [] of dierent normative orders in the same socio-political space (Roth, Boelens et al. 2005, p. 4-5). Often, local norms, rules and values
may partially merge with formalised rules and regulations, creating morphed
institutions that are uid and adaptive in their nature. Acknowledging such
complexity is part of a general trend in analyses of resource exploitation which

29

increasingly recognise that resource governance is more than just the adherence to a set of specic rules; it is characterised by contingency, ambivalence
and conict. Adopting legal pluralism as an analytical framework helps researchers and practitioners understand the multiplicity of ways in which law is given
social meaning, and avoids simplistic dichotomies such as formal/informal law
or de jure/de facto law (Schlager and Ostrom 1992, quoted in Roth, Boelens et
al 2005).
Approaches to water resources management (and irrigation in particular) have
drawn on bodies of thought such as new institutionalism and common property
theories that tended to focus on institutions, incentives and getting rights
right, examining the conditions that were conducive to producing collective
action. More recently, an approach to management issues dubbed the empowerment approach (ibid) has investigated the impact of unequal power relationships, exploring water management from a social justice perspective concerned
with fostering more participatory development practices. Property rights, in this
framework, are explicitly regarded as reections of prevailing patterns of power,
although there is a tendency to downplay existing normative values that structure the ways in which needs and interests are negotiated. Using legal pluralism
as a lens to explore the uidity and hybridisation of rules, norms and values thus
may help in gaining a more thorough understanding of how institutions respond
adaptively to the dynamics of water management systems (see STEPS Working
Paper 2 for a fuller discussion of adaptive governance).

GLOBAL WATER GOVERNANCE

The governance of water and sanitation has become truly global issues, giving
rise to global discourses on what constitutes good governance in the water
realm (e.g. Conca 2006). One such discourse is that of the benets derived from
devolving decision-making authority from national administrations to more
local-level institutions. The belief that the principle of subsidiarity serves the
water users best has been most prominent in the large-scale irrigation management transfers that have taken place during the last couple of decades.
Concomitantly, water rights reform across the globe has tended towards vesting
the state with the power of custodian of a nations water resources in terms of
granting permits or licenses to use (Saleth and Dinar 2000).
Along with the growing emphasis on global water governance, however, has
emerged a tendency to focus on universalised conceptions of problems and
solutions. Because water is a resource that knows no boundaries, and therefore
increasingly has come to be regarded as an inherently global problem, debates

30

tend to revolve around a search for generalised, standardised principles and

ideas Yet as Roth et al.(2006) argue, this overlooks more contextualised understandings of what water management problems actually are. Aggregated and
simplistic representations risk impoverishing the debate and hampering the
search for eective solutions to problems faced by water users in local settings.
Indeed, many actors involved in the process of crafting global governance structures and institutional forms attenuated to the perceived scale of the problem
tend to overlook and downplay that such governance challenges are often
local rather than global in nature. It is such global governance processes, for
instance, that tend to produce the problematic framings of water scarcity that
we discussed in section 1. Thus policy documents and big international events
often produce statements such as the global water crisis must be tackled or
global water resources are growing scarcer rather than focussing on scarcity as
a localised phenomenon.
Moreover, global water governance arrangements have generally followed
the established approaches to regime building based on inter-state treaties
for dealing with trans-national environmental problems, such as managing
resources held in common or preventing transboundary travel of pollution
and toxic waste. Yet critics point out the problems of such approaches, including diculties of implementation amidst unequal global power relations, and
a tendency to promote narrow views of problems and of institutions. Rather,
recent approaches emphasise multi-level, networked governance arrangements
(see STEPS Working Paper 2 on Governance). These often include a multitude
of non-state actors working beyond conventional international regimes. They
often incorporate more pluralistic understandings of authority and territorial
sovereignty, and of the nature of water problems. Such approaches are starting
to be increasingly present in water frameworks (see e.g. Conca 2006) oering
potential ways forward in shaping pathways to Sustainability.

THE RISE OF NEO-LIBERALISM AND MARKET-BASED MECHANISMS

There is now an emerging consensus that international public sector reform in

irrigation and water management arose from transnational pressure for structural adjustment and liberalisation. Often known as beyond the border consensus across donors and multilaterals (Mehta 2004), devolution like privatisation programmes responds to global economic ideas that markets and local
governments should take on more of the tasks hitherto performed by large,
inecient, central state machineries (Crook and Manor, 1998). These result

31

in Washington Consensus- inspired models of decentralisation and privatisation. Accordingly, the need for the reform is based on reducing state subsidies,
increasing cost-recovery, and relieving the state of nancially burdensome
obligations. The underpinning ideology sees the user as a rational, optimising
actor making nancially benecial choices instead of an individual embedded in
specic social, historical and cultural milieux (Mosse 1997; Mosse 1999). More
recent international policy packages like IWRM follow a similar logic that emphasises trading in water as an economic good to compensate for increasing
scarcity (Shah and Koppen 2006). Several of these internationally generated
policy reforms have been criticised for depoliticising the dynamics of water
use and management by simply focusing on creating appropriate governance
structures to mitigate scarcity (Mehta 2005).
The neo-liberal institutional framework has acquired far-reaching legitimacy in
the current policy climate. The privatisation of public or state-owned agencies
is just one aspect of the large spectrum of issues that converge under the
rubric of property relations and entitlements. Ironically, the commodication
and private use of commonly held resources is integral to current models of
both community-driven development, and integrated water management.
Both these governance reforms can be and in many cases are being directed
towards increasing market eciency and maximisation of the resource use.
The hegemonic presence of omnipresent market and consumerism also structures assumptions about aspirations, desires and interests of free individuals.
Overall, and especially given their high nancial costs, these models will invariably aect community dynamics and seem likely to reinforce power relations.
Furthermore, they are often introduced without local participation, rendering
their t with local Sustainability goals questionable. Instead, as earlier examples
in this paper have illustrated, market-based approaches sometimes bring high
social costs that can contribute to poverty and social injustice.

WHATS MISSING IN THE WATER GOVERNANCE DEBATE?

According to Turton et al. (2007) there is a need to unpack the black box of
governance. Arguing that many failures of implementation of water laws can be
put down to a lack of understanding of governance as a concept, they advocate
adopting a perception of governance as a trialogue. In this view, good governance requires eective, and appropriately balanced, interfaces between
society and science, and between government and society, as well as between
government and science. This model has given rise to a denition of water governance as:

32

the process of informed decision making that enables trade os

between competing users of a given resource so as to balance
protection with benecial use in such a way as to mitigate conict,
enhance equity, ensure sustainability and hold ocials accountable.
(Cited from Minister of Water Aairs and Forestry, LB Hendricks
speech at the Governance as Trialogue book launch 22 March)
This denition recognises the importance of how decisions are made and who
makes them. However, the discussion in this section emphasises the need
to go further. Amidst contemporary liquid dynamics, charting pathways to
Sustainability that work for the poor will require greater attention to the politics
of knowledge and decision-making. This is a politics that often maintains dissonance between the three elements of the trialogue. To bridge it may require
more attention to participatory approaches, but also greater reexivity from
powerful institutions, to recognise how their framings of water problems are only
certain views amongst many, often drowning out other important perspectives,
including those of poorer water users. Furthermore, scale remains an issue, with
multi-level, networked governance arrangements being an important complement to both global-level and local approaches. Dealing with liquid dynamics
may require adaptive approaches and institutions that can respond exibly to
emerging conditions. Above all, knowledge politics, issues concerning a wider
political economy and the politics of framing need to come to the fore in water
and sanitation governance debates. This implies a signicant shift from the
current situation, in which most dominant governance approaches emphasise
the universality of knowledge and consistently ignore the plurality of perspectives and local practices. These tendencies in turn impact on (and respond to)
the ways that water and sanitation policies and programmes are appraised, as
the next section explores.

5. DESIGNING APPRAISAL OF WATER AND SANITATION

Strands of debate concerning the governance of water and sanitation systems
are often echoed in their appraisal - by which we mean the social processes
through which knowledges are gathered and produced to inform decision
making and wider institutional commitments. In this section, we review a range
of appraisal designs that have been applied in the water and sanitation arena,
addressing their potential for enhancing equity and Sustainability. The section

33

charts trajectories of change from closed and narrow forms of appraisal design,
epitomised in the use of cost-benet analysis to appraise large dams, through to
those that better allow for complexity, negotiation of perspectives, and sensitivity to power relations. This is, again, by no means a linear history; closed, narrow
approaches still dominate in many settings. Nevertheless, and echoing broader
arguments in STEPS Working Paper 3 on Designs, we suggest that examples
that open up and broaden appraisal oer scope both to include poorer peoples
voice and agency, and to link appraisal with pathways to Sustainability. This in
turn requires attention to how certain framings of the problem lead to dierent
designs; how these lead to institutional arrangements that have a real material
eect in water and sanitation systems and to the actual outcomes for poor
people.

COST BENEFIT ANALYSES AND LARGE DAMS

Conventionally, most forms of appraisal in the water sector have been both
narrow (drawing on a very limited range of often highly technical expertise) and
closed (oering singular recommendations to policy, regardless of context). For
instance, appraisal techniques have drawn on dominant economic frameworks
that focussed on ranking and appraising monetary costs and benets. A classic
example is the application of cost-benet analysis in the social appraisal of
large dam projects. The history of these large technological projects has been
observed in many ways to parallel the wider history of development in general
(Mehta 2005). In the 1950s and 1960s, with the modernisation paradigm
reigning supreme, development tended to be project-focussed, with progress
conceived in a highly unilinear fashion. The large dam, executed in a top-down
way, epitomised this understanding of modernity, as evident in Indias then
Prime Minister Nehrus assertion that these are the modern temples of India
at which I worship. This phrase pointed to the enormity of the potential consequences presented by large dam projects for peoples lives and livelihoods
and their wide distribution in time and space. Of course, these consequences
can be both positive and negative, including promises of Nehrus great leap
forward in the transforming of barren landscapes and the generating of power
and employment as well as potentially devastating environmental impacts and
miseries of human displacement and resettlement.
It was the imperative to nd ways to characterise these kinds of enormous potentialities in a tractable fashion that gave rise to the development of the archetypal supposedly sound scientic appraisal technique of cost-benet analysis
in the rst place. Developed by the US Tennessee Valley Authority in the rst

34

half of the twentieth century specically to appraise large dam projects, this
addresses the diverse range of issues by focusing on identifying and measuring the contending associated costs and benets emerging out of individual
projects. While direct nancial costs or benets are easy to calculate and so
render visible, less intangible economic factors and social issues tend to be neglected and so remain ambiguous such as changes in socio-cultural identity
and gender relations (Elson 1998; Kabeer 1994) or impacts on geographical
space and the environment (Cornerhouse 1998). By contrast with later applications that extend across a range of contending policy options this paradigmatic
application of cost-benet analysis focuses on a single legitimised technological intervention (the large dam project), to the exclusion of alternative possible
pathways associated with other technological or policy routes.
As traditionally practised, these designs fail to account for uncertain dynamics
(such as changes in river ow due to oods / droughts / climate change whose
probabilities are poorly understood). Problems of water scarcity, underdevelopment, poverty and so on are typically framed in highly specic ways, such as to
reduce ambiguity and privilege the benets of large dams. The political attributes of the issues in question are reduced to a simple linear balance between
the rights of the majority (or nation as a whole), pitted against the rights of a
small minority who are asked to sacrice their interests in the face of this greater
good (Roy 1999). In this way, these approaches epitomise centralised thinking,
monolithic planning around single pathways and a neglect of local knowledges
and framings and alternative modalities for appraisal.
When considered in detail, cost-benet analyses typically display a further strong
bias in the quantication of costs and benets, privileging prevailing values in
existing markets. Given that markets are not neutral but are laden with social
and power relations, this means that certain attributes and interests tend to be
valued more highly than those of other groups (e.g. irrigated land is often valued
more highly than common property land or mens economic activities receive
greater value than those of women). Beyond this, it is often impossible to put a
discrete monetary cost or benet on intangibles such as the loss of livelihoods
that have never entered the market-place. In particular, womens lives and activities are often disproportionately centred around these intangibles making
it especially dicult to calculate the gendered aspects of costs and benets.
It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that the social and environmental impacts
of dams came to be more fully documented (e.g. Goldsmith and Hildyard
1992; Cernea, 1997; Scudder, 1995; Thukral 1992). The ensuing critiques of
cost-benet analysis have highlighted the importance of making the invisible

35

more visible. They have been sceptical of quantitative reductive approaches

to the estimating of costs and benets and their respective distributions. They
see socio-cultural issues as a function of equity and distribution, just as access
and control over resources are intrinsic to it. In particular, gender scholars have
demonstrated how a balance sheet approach uses dominant modes of enquiry
which serve to legitimise the unequal distribution of resources (Elson 1997).
Despite this growing body of criticism, however, wider indirect impacts of
dams on the lives and livelihoods of diverse groups of people across entire
river basins, have not received as much attention. These include the wide scale
dynamics of changes in the environment, in social organisation (including
family, community and kinship networks), in natural resources and nancial
resources, in infrastructure development and in consumption and production
processes. Vulnerable groups like women and children tend to be impacted
by dams in ways that require an evaluation that goes beyond the excluded
monetary loss of land (Colson 1999; Mehta and Srinivasan 1999). These analyses
suggest that appraising the impacts of large-scale water development projects
requires a broader approach that includes the perspectives of a wider range of
stakeholders, addressing vulnerabilities across scales.
MULTI-STAKEHOLDER FORUMS THE CASE OF THE WORLD COMMISSION ON
DAMS

Protest movements around the world have questioned conventional approaches to dam-building and appraisal since the late 1980s. They have demanded
accountability from implementing agencies: for example the Inspection panel
in the World Bank was set up in DATE to investigate rights and policy violations in
a host of water projects around the world. Such protests have also led to several
changes in decision-making procedures and appraisal methods.
The World Commission on Dams was a unique multi-stakeholder dialogue initiated by the World Bank, IUCN, donors and activist groups in 2000. Its mandate
was to investigate the myriad aspects of dams concerning economic growth,
equity, environmental conservation and participation, as well as to produce
guidelines for future decision-making in water resource development. It concluded that while dams have made a considerable contribution to human development, in too many cases unacceptable costs have been borne in social
and environmental terms. Some of the guidelines around decision-making
processes included participatory and comprehensive needs assessment before
new dams are built and a thorough investigation of all options and alternatives
to the proposed project. Furthermore, the Commission called for free, prior

36

and informed consent of indigenous peoples. It also demanded demonstrable

public acceptance of binding formal agreements among all stakeholders with
implementable arrangements for monitoring and addressing grievances before
a scheme is implemented (see WCD 2000).
A central proposal of the World Commission on Dams (WCD, 2000) new framework for decision-making was the adoption of a rights and risks approach as a
practical and principled basis to identify all legitimate stakeholders in negotiating
development choices and agreements. Support for the WCD framework implicitly recognises the value of the rights and risks approach and that past problems
with dam projects often derive from a lack of recognition of the rights of the adversely aected population (not only those resettled, but others aected such
as downstream communities), the involuntary risks to which they have been
subjected, and their associated rights at risk. It is a framework underpinned
by internationally agreed principles embodied in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948), the UN Declaration on the Right to Development (1986)
and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992). It encompasses those people directly or indirectly aected, either positively or adversely,
as well as other interested parties including those with no direct voice, such as
those representing biodiversity.
In order to achieve this, the WCD proposed moving away from a conventional
aggregate balance-sheet approach, in which benets to one group are numerically oset against adverse impacts to other sections of society, to a process of
negotiation with the stakeholder interests involved. Recognition of rights and
assessment of risks (particularly rights at risk) formed the basis of the WCDs
approach to stakeholder analysis and more eective participatory processes,
starting with a needs and options assessment early in the planning process. In
the event that a dam emerged as the most appropriate response, or part of a
broad range of measures, then the rights and risks approach was seen as fundamental to negotiated processes around not only mitigation, monitoring and
management measures, but benet sharing and other steps to enhance the
overall development performance of dam project. It was envisaged by its proponents as an integrating tool for economic, social and environmental dimensions. Its relevance goes beyond the dams arena and, as a tool for stakeholder
involvement and enhancing the eectiveness of participation, is applicable in a
wider development context.
The rights and risks approach is intended to serve as an integrating tool that
has the potential to encompass social, economic and environmental dimensions in a single framework through a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques. As such, it oers potential as a framework for appraising equity
and Sustainability. It is also a vehicle to operationalise rights-based approaches

37

with the overarching aim of achieving equity. Moreover, it is an analytical procedure to help create conditions that legitimise and promote stakeholder involvement, leading to more eective participation and thereby improved development outcomes. However, several tensions exist. Consider, for example, issues
of human rights. The perception of what should be understood as comprising
a basic human right often draws on universal standards that dene water use
as a minimum quantity of litres per capita (cf. WHO 2003), with a vibrant debate
still ongoing regarding how much water would be adequate (see e.g. the synthesis on the human right to water from the 4th World Water Forum in Mexico,
http://www.worldwatercouncil.org/leadmin/wwc/News/newsletter/synthesis_righttowater_4wwf.pdf). But human rights and, when it comes to involuntary
resettlement or displacement, what being displaced means, are not just legal
matters; they also depend on culture as well as on the development standards of
a country. Human rights themselves can be contradictory and contested, while
the governments right to develop national and water resources can come into
conict with local communities rights to their local land and access to water
resources. Finally, power imbalances can exist in a society that inuence whose
voices are heard and whose rights are recognized (Bird, Haas and Mehta, 2004).
Similar tensions exist around risks. Risk assessments in water continue to be
very technocratic and top-down, and to emphasise narrow notions of risk rather
than the range of kinds of incertitude that tend to be at play in dynamic systems
(see STEPS Working Paper 1 on Dynamics). The challenge is thus not only to
continually improve and extend risk assessment, but equally to introduce tools
to balance risk and uncertainty assessments across dierent disciplines - tools
that are stakeholder friendly and not overly complex. In particular, the poorest
and the vulnerable have their livelihoods at risk, but have usually had little if any
inuence on decision outcomes.
In this light, Bird, Haas and Mehta (2004) tried to operationalise the rights and
risks approach and argued for the need to add responsibilities as the third R.
The responsibilities dimension can provide a means to inform decision-making
at dierent levels. Moreover, rights are often incomplete without clarity on
duties, obligations and responsibilities. Dening the roles and responsibilities
of dierent actors can help monitor and evaluate decision-making processes.
It also creates necessary conditions for constructive negotiation at dierent
stages, building on previous experience, as well as providing mechanisms to
seek accountability and redress when rights are violated or when risks are borne
disproportionately by individual interest groups (e.g. those to be displaced, the
poor and vulnerable). But a central tension over responsibilities results from
fundamental dierences in the perspectives of interest groups. Although it is

38

a broad characterisation, government agencies and/or developers (public or

private) may be suspicious or concerned about the rights agenda and similarly
civil society, including NGOs, may be suspicious about dominance of the responsibility agenda.
In sum, the rights, risks and responsibilities approach (3 Rs) allows for interesting and unique ways to achieve openness and breadth in designs and appraisals. But they somewhat fall short of tackling issues concerning unequal power
relations amongst dierent stakeholders and how power might determine
whose rights, risks and responsibilities prevail. Furthermore, in most situations
stakeholder negotiation, where it is practiced, is largely seen as a way to inform
decision-makers at the political level of the convergent and divergent views and
degree of consensus on a project. To date stakeholders are rarely empowered to
make the nal decision on whether to develop a dam project or not; this is seen
primarily as the responsibility of government or parliament (ibid).
While the WCD currently occupies the moral high ground in appraisal design for
large dams, however, translating this into the reality of actual projects is often
another matter. Given new aid, development and geo-political conditions, including the entry of countries such as China to the dam-building scene in developing countries, ensuring that WCD-type principles are followed is proving very
dicult - and they are frequently outed. Indeed, the WCDs conclusions were
discredited both by the World Bank, and by a number of powerful countries.
There are therefore major limits to the eectiveness of such appraisal processes
in contexts where powerful actors can reject them or continue to violate rights
with impunity. The WCD itself was not clear on issues concerning relations of
power - how to share power; how to contain the power of the powerful, or how
to deal with the impunity of powerful actors.
Other recent stakeholder initiatives include the multi-stakeholder dialogue
on the private sector and multi-stakeholder dialogues at the Bonn Freshwater
Conference in 2001. This is to be welcomed as a clear move away from top-down
and closed decision making appraisal systems. Still, the overly technical nature
of many stakeholder platforms can exclude the genuine participation of local
people. Take the controversial Berg water project in South Africa. While South
Africa ocially endorses the recommendations of the World Commission on
Dams and is open to deliberative and participatory decision making processes
on large dams, Thompson (2005) revealed that the so-called stakeholder processes were top-down and constituted a rubber stamping exercise where authoritarian scientic notions of risk and scarcity blanked out a genuine debate
around the options to the dam. Thus, even progressive stakeholder platforms
can also serve as g leaves for decisions that have already been made.

39
ACTION LEARNING/RESEARCH AND REFLEXIVITY

In response to critiques concerning the narrow, top-down nature of many appraisal processes in the water sector - as well as to the challenges of dealing
with complex dynamic systems - there has been growing attention to appraisal
approaches that emphasise participatory action research, learning, and reexivity.
For instance, action learning processes are emerging around community-led
sanitation initiatives in South Asia. These are becoming connected through
learning alliances, a process in which research and development agencies share
knowledge and learn together what works and why8. The partners then join
forces to build local capacity to use that knowledge in practice. In the South
Asian context, the learning alliances have formed especially around issues of
scaling up community-led sanitation initiatives, concerned with how islands of
success can be replicated in other regions and cultural contexts. This means
bringing community members, researchers and practitioners together to think
about issues such as phasing, community inclusion, institutional design and
facilitation as well as participatory monitoring and evaluation. Initial results
suggest that the emergence of emergent and spontaneous leaders who spread
the approach, intensive community mobilisation and excellent facilitation processes are key to achieving sustainability in sanitation practices. These help
maintain open-defecation free villages as well as the spread of total sanitation
practices. By contrast, top down nancial systems that encourage hardware
subsidies, bureaucratic practices that ignore local mobilisation and excessive
reporting systems tend to be inimical to successful and sustainable scaling out/
up (see http://www.livelihoods.org/hot_topics/CLTS.html)
Action-learning and learning alliances can provide a vehicle to open up reexivity amongst the various partners involved concerning their own knowledge
and understandings of the system, and other possible knowledges that might
be excluded. This connects with debates about and proposals for reexive institutions in social theory. In the context of water and sanitation, what is key
is how new policies can access previously hidden or suppressed knowledge,
and accelerate the implementation of agreed policy objectives by gaining the
trust and understanding of citizens. Reexive institutions thus oer potential
for generating and critiquing knowledge and discourse, providing a forum and

For examples of learning and practice alliances in the African context see RiPPLE - Researchinspired Policy and Practice Learning in Ethiopia and the Nile Region http://www.odi.org.uk/wpp/
Projects/RiPPLE.html

40

mechanism for assessing and implementing public policy in ways that avoid
many of the problems of dominating discourses and social exclusion discussed
in this paper.

LOCAL, SUSTAINABLE AND EQUITABLE?

Nevertheless, critiques directed to the Habermasian notion of deliberative democracy (see STEPS Working Paper 2 on Governance) also apply in the water
and sanitation domain. These critiques question the assumption that citizen
dialogue and debate can build consensus based entirely on reason and rational
communication; the assumption in various forms of participatory water management such as water user associations. Rather, social groups may have incommensurable worldviews that could not be reconciled with deliberation and
reason alone (Moue 1999). The heavy emphasis put on building procedural
democracy (legal frameworks, building institutions and association, rules and
regulations) at the expense of ensuring equitable distribution of resources has
also come under criticism. Incidents of elite capture of these associations and
institutions are commonly reported (Raby 1991; Michener 1998; Jairath 1999;
Mollinga 2000).
Moreover, it is questionable how far ecological sustainability and democracy are
necessarily compatible. Straight Habermasian communicative rationality may
in fact be counter-productive to environmental objectives in instances where
local knowledge does not include sucient appreciation of environmental
dynamics and long-term environmental risks and uncertainties. For example,
open defecation free villages in Bangladesh may achieve toilet construction
through local participation and empowerment. But the overall impacts on
groundwater levels and issues concerning water contamination are often
unknown to local community members and NGO workers. In other instances,
peoples rationality, as expressed in dialogue, may focus on particular livelihood
issues at the expense of a longer-term or wider perspective. Thus in an extensive review of watershed development projects, Kerr (2002) found that people
selected soil and water conservation measures because they were linked to
employment opportunities, but that these often did not meet their ecological
needs or priorities, leading to poor long term maintenance of the conservation
systems. In short, the challenge is to marry perspectives on Sustainability that
reect the priorities of the poor, while also taking account of biophysical complexities and uncertainties. This will require approaches that emphasise new
learning alliances and partnerships across places and disciplines.

41

6. CONCLUSIONS: TOWARDS A RESEARCH AGENDA

This paper has argued that despite growing global attention to water and sanitation, there often remains a major disconnect between globalised assessments
and policy debates, and the needs and priorities of poor and marginalised people
as they live with liquid dynamics. Such dynamics emerge from the complex,
interconnected processes of social, technological and biophysical change that
pervade water and sanitation systems. They operate across multiple scales,
and involve many forms of incomplete knowledge and incertitude as complex,
unpredictable forces such as climate change and rapid urbanisation interplay
with already-dynamic socio-technical systems. Yet despite such dynamics, approaches to dening water and sanitation problems and designing solutions
often rest on an image of a more stable, controllable world. Coupled with views
that see water and sanitation problems in aggregate, technical terms, ignoring
the social, political and distributional issues that often underlie what may appear
as scarcity, for instance - the result is often policies and interventions that
promote singular views of progress in water and sanitation. Yet such progress
often fails to address sustainability, or to meet goals of poverty reduction and
social justice.
This gloomy diagnosis does not of course apply across the board. Indeed the
paper has traced many important moves in the governance and appraisal of
water and sanitation issues: moves that, for instance, recognise and value decentralised, local and community based approaches as part of multi-level governance processes; and moves away from narrow, closed appraisal procedures
such as cost-benet analysis to approaches that embrace a greater breadth of
inputs and openness to dierent possible outcomes. Nevertheless, even those
approaches that recognise complex social dynamics often fail to connect these
eectively with the complexities of the biophysical world: with the dynamic hydrology and ecology of water and sanitation systems. And most fundamentally,
we have identied a pervasive tendency to ignore or downplay the multiple,
divergent understandings or framings of system dynamics and Sustainability
goals held by dierent people and groups - whether local water users, development agencies, scientists or engineers.
As these multiple framings interplay with the liquid dynamics of water and sanitation systems, so there are many possible pathways to Sustainability. These
will be directed towards dierent goals, and emphasise dierent dimensions of
systems properties - of stability, durability, resilience and robustness - as key to
achieving these. Some of these pathways might lead to Sustainability, poverty

42

reduction and social justice as valued by particular groups; others will not. As
we have explored, which pathways unfold over time depends heavily on power
relations and institutional arrangements. We have traced many instances in
which these are profoundly not geared to meeting the Sustainability goals of
poorer groups, whether in cases where political and commercial interests drive
the development of large dams that displace people, or where global water governance is geared to universalised notions of scarcity that fail to reect peoples
livelihood priorities. In other instances, governance is aimed at supporting local
users - for instance through community-based approaches - yet in ways that
overlook intra-community and gendered power relations. Alongside attention
to adaptive forms of governance that can respond exibly to dynamics and
uncertainties, then, this paper has underscored a need for attention to power
relations - across all scales - as a central feature of any analysis.
Furthermore, we have argued strongly for reexivity in analysis and governance,
whereby those involved recognise more fully how their social and political positions shape the ways they understand water and sanitation systems, and how
this in turn shapes their management interventions. Only though such reexivity
amongst the institutions that currently dominate water and sanitation debates,
we suggest, can space be opened up for attention to the alternative pathways to
Sustainability that might better suit poor and marginalised water users.
These arguments suggest a number of elements that need to inform a research
agenda for the STEPS Centre in the water and sanitation domain. In short, this
needs to include attention to:

The dynamics of complex socio-technical-ecological water and sanitation systems, and how resilience, robustness, durability and stability might be built in the context of new shocks and stresses from, for
instance, climate change, rapid urbanisation and new middle class
hygiene movements;

Processes at dierent scales (temporal and spatial), and the ways these
interlock and are felt in dierent places and by dierent groups;

The framings of water and sanitation systems and dynamics held by

dierent people, and how they lead to particular, valued Sustainability
goals and properties;

The governance and appraisal of water and sanitation systems, exploring how these are shaped by power relations, including politicaleconomy and power-knowledge, and how approaches might better

43

enable poorer people's own perspectives and agency in water and

sanitation services provision;

The inuence of history and culture in shaping water and sanitation

knowledge and practice, whether in divers local settings or in the
contexts of global debates and agencies.

Building pathways to pro-poor, equitable Sustainability in water and sanitation

will inevitably involve a plurality of approaches. Mapping what works when,
where and how will need to involve detailed case studies, urban as well as rural,
whether focusing in on water and sanitation issues or examining their interaction with other processes - for instance in relation to health, food or agriculture. Learning through such case studies, in turn, should help further develop
the pathways approach introduced in this paper, to understand how poor and
marginalised women and men can exercise agency over the functionality of
water and sanitation systems, helping to make them Sustainable over time. As
demonstrated in this paper, it is now time to move beyond those conventional
indices of sustainability - and those denitions of water and sanitation problems
and solutions - that tell us little about equity, pro-poor agency, power and resilience. By drawing together a concern with material and biophysical dynamics,
and with the ways that dierent people frame these, the STEPS Centre hopes
to advance an agenda for understanding and action in the water and sanitation
domain that will link poverty reduction and social justice with Sustainability in
today's accelerating liquid dynamics.

44

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